AUGUST OF ‘22 – LETTER OF CONCERN FROM SWEDISH SCIENTIST, OLLE JOHANSSON, TO LONGMONT CITY COUNCIL
(regarding the rollout of wireless smart meter
infrastructure in Longmont)
———- Original Message ———-
From: Olle Johansson <olle.johansson500@gmail.com>
To: Tim Waters Longmont City Council <Tim.Waters@longmontcolorado.gov>
Cc: Doe Kelly <doekelly@juno.com>
Subject: Letter of concern (regarding the rollout of wireless smart meter infrastructure in Longmont)
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2022 21:26:38 +0200
Dear Esteemed Mayor and dear City Council of Longmont,
My name is Olle Johansson, and I am a neuroscientist, retired from the world-famous Karolinska Institute and the equally famous Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, both with their close associations to the Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry and Physics, respectively.
I write to you today from my home in Stockholm, Sweden, at the request of my dear friend, Ms. Doe Kelly.
I am hereby submitting some personal reflections because I understand that you at present have decided on the fast deployment of wireless systems, especially the wireless smart meters for electricity and water metering, without adequate corporate sharing of information with the public, and that there are concerns from residents about the cumulative harm which is mounting from today’s rapidly increasing levels of radiofrequency radiation.
For many years I have been studying the adverse health and biological effects of wireless gadgets, such as cell phones, DECT phones, WIFI, wireless baby alarms, smart meters, laptops, and similar. During this work, I have been contacted by many residents around the world, in connection with different legal bills, appeals and public calls, and in connection with proposed base station installations, wireless systems near and in schools, smart meters in homes and in workplaces, 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, 6G, and much more.
I am aware of your impending installation of wireless smart meters in your city. I am also aware that as a city, you are very much concerned about the steep decline in pollinators in our world, and are taking active steps towards deciding and implementing a strategy for your city, to help the pollinators. For this I applaud you.
As a research scientist who is actively pursuing answers as to why our pollinators are disappearing at such an alarming rate (more than 75% gone in Germany already 5 years ago), especially the honey bees (down by more than 90% in Canada) and bumblebees (down by more than 90% in the USA), I can not yet definitively state that there is a causal relationship between the disappearance of bees and the introduction of wireless smart meters, only that the former – in different scientific studies – do not appreciate the radiation used for wireless telecommunication. However, as a scientist who is highly interested in the continuation of not only pollinators but also of homo sapiens, or, humans, instead of adding more wireless infrastructure in the form of smart meters in a mesh network, that may have unknown consequences as to how much they in actuality contribute to pollinator declines, I urgently advise you to consider, instead, staying with wired analog metering solutions that have served you well, I am told, for many decades. In Europe, we call this the Precautionary Principle. It is based on common sense.
I counsel you in the most urgent of tones to halt your planned implementation of these meters. Your thoughts around becoming energy-independent are admirable, but mine and others’ research show the possibility of unintended consequences that these meters bring, and the possibility that they contribute to species extinction is very real.
And as my friend Ms. Doe Kelly has said to me, in her inimitable humorous fashion, “all we are sayin’ is, give bees a chance.”
When we lose our bees, it is then we know that we are in real trouble.
No bees = no food = no children = catastrophe.
*****
There is a growing concern that microwave exposure, used for wireless telecommunication, will be harmful to life on the planet, and that it will destroy the environment through unsustainable energy consumption, radiation emissions, harmful mining and pollution, which all will endanger biodiversity and natural habitats, it will threaten our privacy which, in turn, will increase the risk of cybercrime, data leak, theft, resale, and misuse of artificial intelligence. In short, it is becoming more and more evident that we must take action to protect life, environment, and our data via strict recommendations, effective self-protection requirements and consecutive measures for humans and wildlife, and firm regulation of electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation sources and their exposures of the general public and of the wildlife.
Wireless communication is now being implemented in our daily life in a very fast way. At the same time, it is becoming more and more obvious that exposure to electromagnetic fields may result in highly unwanted health effects. This has been demonstrated in a very large number of studies and includes cellular DNA damage (which may lead to the initiation of cancer as well as mutations that carry down generations), disruptions and alterations of cellular functions like increases in intracellular stimulatory pathways and calcium handling, disruption of tissue structures like the blood-brain barrier (which may allow toxins to enter the brain), impact on the vessel and immune functions, and loss of fertility. It should be noted that we are not the only species in jeopardy, practically all animals, plants, and bacteria may be at stake. For the latter, Taheri et al (2017) have demonstrated that the exposure to 900 MHz GSM mobile phone radiation and 2.4 GHz radiofrequency radiation emitted from common Wi-Fi routers made Listeria monocytogenes and Escherichia coli resistant to different antibiotics. To say this finding is “scary” is a classical English understatement.
Because the effects are reproducibly observed and links to pathology can not be excluded, the Precautionary Principle should be in force in the implementation of this new technology within the society. Therefore, policymakers immediately should strictly control exposure by defining biologically-based maximal exposure guidelines also taking into account long-term, non-thermal effects, and including especially vulnerable groups, such as the elderly, the ill, the genetically and/or immunologically challenged, children and fetuses, and persons with the functional impairment electrohypersensitivity (which in Sweden is a fully recognized functional impairment, and therefore receives an annual governmental disability subsidy).
So, in essence, science is providing ever more convincing evidence that the radiation emitted by our wireless telecommunications systems can affect biological systems including humans, pets, livestock and wildlife. These biological effects are acting even at very low exposure levels.
I suggest that you now listen very carefully to scientific reason and fact-based common sense, rather than only to commercial interests. The latter have many times led mankind badly astray, and can do it again.
With my very best regards
Yours sincerely
Olle Johansson, professor, retired – but still active – from the Karolinska Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology, both in Stockholm, Sweden
